Last week we rolled out a new website that came with a whole new look for Agape Red!

We had been working on this project for several months, planning, and developing it. Because it is an internal project, it always gets second priority with client’s work. We initiated the project with two developers and a third one joined a month or so before the – third or fourth – deadline we set for ourselves.

As the community liaison, I was assigned as the client for our website, and I came across some interesting challenges along with the team.

We used Heartbeat, our project management tool we created in-house, and tried to follow our standard process like we do with clients.

The team working on the website met weekly to track our progress. Our developers only worked on this project during our investment time, four hours a week, and other smaller breaks in between for coffee, etc. Which really makes it three hours a week, with other internal meetings.

Having a developer work on a project for only two or three hours a week can really drag the deadline – no matter how simple the project is.

Another issue we encountered was things looking completely different in between laptops. My laptop has a certain number of pixels, different from the developers laptops, and some fonts and sizes were off. Giving feedback on the project was tricky because at times it was uncertain if it was a CSS mistake, or my laptop.

Having all that said we still have a lot of work left to do on our website but we are really happy with the way it’s looking! We wanted to get it out as soon as possible and then slowly keep working on details and adding features. Once we hit our MVP we agreed it was time to take our project live and see how our audience interacts with it. In the next couple of weeks we are focusing on the remaining parts of the project.

By going through this process we learned about the challenges and roadblocks our clients may face and we now have a deeper understanding.